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Knitting Wikia:Community Portal
KnitWiki is still just a baby, and even just a little help right now can really help it grow! If you have a pattern, go ahead and upload it! To do so, just go to the Location bar of your browser and replace "KnitWiki:Community_Portal" with the name of your pattern. If an actual pattern comes up, that name is already taken; but more likely you'll get a page titled "Editing (your pattern name)". Just paste in your pattern! If you're already familiar with wiki editing, you can touch up the pattern, but if not, someone else can do so later. Click "Save page" and your pattern will go live. If you don't have patterns of your own to post, you can still be a huge help to the project. Any time you see a notation that might not be clear, link it up! Edit the page (clicking the "edit" links either at the top of the section or at the top of the page), and put a pair of square brackets around it, like this: St st Once you save the change, this will appear as a link, like this: St st If it is in blue, someone has already written the article about that stitch or concept. If it's in red, you can click on it and write the article yourself! One of the great things about this wiki software is that it keeps archives of changes. That means you can edit without fear of destroying anything—the very worst that will happen is that we'll have to revert it to a previous version. Have fun! People who edited this wiki *User:Fancypantalons *User:Knitdiva *User:Kukkurovaca *User:Angela *User:Lauragayle *User:Vlnjodie *User:Vickienj *User:Bellatrix *User:LisaDusseault *User:SabineCretella *User:NYGal98 *User:Educe Please add yourself to this list if you are an editor - this can help us to get contact to each other and try to find out how to help this wiki. The community is very small and therefore needs particular care. --SabineCretella 16:57, 1 January 2007 (UTC) Community ... how to create it Well we are really just a handful of people ... so I wrote the following lines on the user page of the latest active user I found on this wiki: I do serveral things - from crochetry to quilting and of course knitting. Wouldn't it make sense to move this wiki to a general "wool, yarn and fabric" wiki? All of us work with different means and the community would grow faster and therefore the wiki would become more relevant sooner. Editing will be more fun for all interested people. Furthermore I would permit to create multilingual pages from the beginning ... it does not make sense to limit things to too small communities. What are your thoughts? Editing alone on a wiki can be frustrating ... I built up more than one community and I always find it a pity that often it is only a lack of direct communication that prevents things from happening. While writing this Lisa sent me an e-mail - so I say "thank you Lisa" publicly. Please write down your own thoughts, wishes etc. here and if you are not often around it would be nice to know where we can contact you. Thank you! --SabineCretella 17:13, 1 January 2007 (UTC) :Do you think the wiki URL would need to change? Or could the site include crochet etc whilst still being knitting.wikia.com? I'm not sure of a good word to encompass the related activities. Angela talk 13:45, 5 January 2007 (UTC) ::Well in German I would call it "Handarbeiten" ... in English I have more a kind of a problem, since I don't know the correct translation - leo.org gives me "handworks" but that sounds strange - I don't like it. Anyway it should not be too much of a problem to change the name in a second step. Lisa in her mail used "fiber arts" to describe it. Maybe we could use the choice of the name as a reason to write to so many knitting/crocheting/quilting etc. groups asking them for help. This would also mean that we already build a group of people who then know about the wiki. --SabineCretella 20:20, 5 January 2007 (UTC) :::Handicraft maybe? Finding a wider community to choose this is a good idea. Angela talk 22:12, 5 January 2007 (UTC) ::::handicraft sounds good. In this specific period I myself have to knit and sew clothes for Barbie dolls (the newest hobbie of Luna) searching for free patterns I found many sites and probably these would allow for inclusion here since the patterns are free anyway. In yahoogroups they are closed - here they would have the possibility to make them accessible to all and contemporarily show how active their mailing list is. At a certain stage some might completely pass over to the wiki, even if I doubt that since many still prefer e-mail for conversations. But back to handicraft: this could include all - from stitching to sewing to knitting and crochetry - so I personally would go for it. --SabineCretella 10:15, 6 January 2007 (UTC) :::If this is just about knitting, I'm afraid people like myself will not stop here if the name is so generalized. I was looking specifically for knitting and that's the only craft I am interested in. "Handicraft" dilutes it and would make me keep going to look for something that only specializes in knitting. Perhaps if you want to include crochet too, you could call it "Yarncraft" or something similar. Just my thoughts - I don't have a problem with the name as is. --User: NYGal98 11:49 DST, 12 January 2007 ::::Well there would be a special knitting portal then - this means you reach the first page and from there you can choose among various portals like knitting, crochet, stitching, quilting, sewing etc. This means you would have your special place for knitting. The problem here is: we need a group of people to work together and exchange, communication etc. I myself for example do knitting, crocheting, stitching and patchwork/quilting. Often these techniques are mixed and it would be problematic to go from one wiki to the other just because it is only about one single technique. There are many people like me. So eventually we could create one wiki with single portals for the different techniques. Maybe knitting.wikia.com could link to the knitting portal directly so that you don't see the mainpage when you access the wiki. This is something that could be considered also for crochet.wikia.org, patchwork.wikia.org etc. Please consider also that creating a single wikia for each of the techniques (that are really many) would duplicate admin efforts and therefore the people doing the admin would need x-times the time for admin jobs and therefore would contribute less. Being a small community this can be really a lot. --SabineCretella 11:45, 13 January 2007 (UTC) :The problem, I think, with creating a more general wiki is, where do you draw the line? For example, I would argue that quilting doesn't belong in the same wiki with knitting, as they strike me as distinctly different disciplines. Besides, what's wrong with a bunch of smaller, more focused wikis that are themselves tightly interlinked where it makes sense (perhaps with a top-level "meta-wiki" that links them all together)? Granted, this is pretty similar to just using namespaces, but it strikes me as a little less "messy". :As for language, I have no idea how that problem is generally approached on wikis. Judging from Wikipedia, it appears the idea is to create sister wikis that would host the translated content. But someone else may have more experience regarding this topic. --User:Fancypantalons 2:05, 24 January 2007 (MDT) Jumpstart Okay, a little post here to see if there are any lurkers out there who have been visiting recently, but haven't touched the pages: I've seen that indeed not a lot of people are adding content here. But people may be coming here, and I'm interested to know what those people would like to see here. Myself, as a knitter, I like to see the Wiki functionality used to make pattern reading more easy to do (through consistent formatting of the pattern text, and the ability the hyperlink directly to a technique-explaining page). But the more I look at other existing knitting publishing means, the patterns have some similarities, but many nuances to the various styles. Some patterns are best expressed with graph paper and symbols to indicate the type of stitch to do, while others give line-by-line text descriptions of the actions (k *p2 k2 repeat from * to end of row), and some use the latter technique, but not each row of the pattern. Hence I've started by working on MediaWiki Templates that cover the latter two styles (I think the first is not going to be able to be done with a Template...). But enough about me, what about you. What are you, as knitters looking to find here? Any old site can list knitting stores and display patterns/techniques; what can we do to utilize the power of a Wiki to make it more beneficial and not just rehash what's already out there? Wiki's inherently allow comments, and hence can be a collaborative means to improve upon an existing pattern (should the author want it); is that what you'd like to see? If there were Templates to make easy work of making a professional-looking knitting pattern to print out or link and share with friends, would that be most beneficial? Post a comment in this section with your thoughts (and don't forget to sign your comment). --MidnightLightning 03:59, 30 January 2008 (UTC) :Hmm, seeing as I've got no responses, the main problem here is a lack of people visiting. Well, in that case, advertisement and getting the word out may be what is needed around here. I was thinking that having a site that rehashes some of the techniques of knitting might have already been done at Wikibooks, but it looks like there's no "knitting" book there on techniques, etc. So perhaps starting there with building up content here about techniques/stitches and create a conclusive tutorial or knowledge base area would generate interest. Discussions about the techniques and how to best do them could follow. Though since it doesn't exist yet, might this idea be best to be done at Wikibooks as a reference guide rather than here? Wikia is more about community, and content that grows, rather than a static textbook. Unless there's a strong base of users out there willing to contribute who have original designs and would be contributing their ideas to the wiki, there's not much in the way of "community" other than local knit-alongs and store recommendations to offer. Thoughts? :--MidnightLightning 21:01, 21 April 2008 (UTC)